Think+Tank+Response

Think Tank Reflection Bryan Cary An issue that arose in my Linguistic Dimension Study, and something I still am concerned about, is a matter of complexity and overlapping informal or home languages that are sure to be present in most classrooms. The reality is that any given classroom will be far more complex and nuanced than simply African American English vs. Formal English. So for my Think Tank discussion I wanted to discuss the possibilities for dealing with this issue in practice with actual lessons and activities. Even this week I saw a flier on a local community billboard for a book fair promising Spanish, French and English books; so it’s very evident that there might not be one single strategy for teaching the standard skills of reading and writing in Formal English when so many different skills sets will be brought to the same table. I wanted to know what might bring such a diverse class together to make the material beneficial for every student. In my study I emphasized a need for a community in the classroom, but how do I actually go about creating that community? While the texts we have read in class, such as __Code Switching__ by Wheeler and Swords, __Getting It Right__ by Smith and Wilhelm, and __A Teacher’s Introduction to African American English__ by Redd and Webb, all offer very instructive examples of useful exercises for the classroom, I was really looking for something more inclusive and general that could be adapted to the degree of diversity that could, and probably will, change from year to year and drastically so. In our discussion we came up with some ideas for activities that I think could be extremely useful and productive. Both and Lauren and John said they had similar thoughts and reservations about this idea. We all agreed that it would be important to begin the year, or any given semester, with an activity and a discussion to emphasize the need for respect in approaching the differences between each student’s home language and the idea that a mastery of Formal English could be a means for everyone to communicate better with one another. It would give students the idea that learning Formal English has a real life purpose when they can see that it has an authentic use. We brainstormed some ideas for activities as well. Lauren mentioned an exercise where students take on roles to write about various topics and then can swap those roles to get an idea of how others might approach the same idea. Along these same lines we came up with a writing exercise of giving students a topic and having them write about it in their home language, then having them trade these write-ups so that students could translate them into Formal English. At the same time they could learn the skills of Formal English while coming to better understand the languages of their peers. This activity in particular seems to me a real step forward in integrating the differences of the class and at the same time moving toward a common goal together. The tasks could, and I think probably should, be geared toward a legitimate task such as writing in some public forum like a newspaper or a letter to a politician to even further reinforce the idea of practicality. Ultimately, though, the real goal as Dr. Turner herself pointed out when she joined us briefly, would be to make students the identifiers of language patterns themselves so that in the end they are the independent learners we aim for them to be.